Friday 18 March 2016

Friday 18/3/2016 - Another Trip 35, Watch Fairs in Switzerland, Tweaking Bookshelves & This Week's Wristwatches.




I wore the Omega Speedmaster earlier in the week. I haven't worn this watch much so far this year, but whenever I put it on, it feels like I'm wearing it for the first time. 














Here we are, halfway through March and it's time for the annual BaselWorld Watch Fair which takes place in Switzerland. I'll be interested to see what some of my favourite brands unveil this year. Not that I'm in the market for anything. I'm just curious to see if A) there will the a noticeable shift towards smaller-sized watches, and B) if we'll see a few more watches based on designs from brand archives. 
Watch sizes started getting larger back around 2003 and I thought it was just a passing fad. I was wrong. It stuck around, and is still evident today when I see certain types of watches in a 43mm diameter that would have been a 38mm watch ten years ago. There has been a slight shift back down towards smaller sizing in recent years, but many brands still have dress watches tipping past the classic 40mm size. We'll see what this year's watch fair brings. 
As for re-editions of past models, quite a few brands got onto this bandwagon a few years ago. Tissot released the wonderful Visodate model five years ago and it retailed for $750 AUD. Meanwhile, Omega brought out the $7,595.oo AUD Seamaster 300 Co-Axial a couple of years ago. Both watches have been hugely successful for their respective brands. So, it would appear that these heritage models do indeed have something for everyone. 
Again, I'll be interested to see what this year holds. 

I switched over to the Sinn 103 St Sa chronograph. Monday was Labour Day here in Victoria and I knew that the next day was going to still feel like a Monday to me. Happens to me every time we get a long weekend. So, I wanted a watch that had both day and date on it;


It's been Autumn here since March 1st, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it was still Summer. We've had some very hot days here. Today's temperature got to 32 degrees C (around 90 deg F) and, by the time I got home from my twenty minute drive from the train station in my non air-conditioned car, I had to peel my shirt off before throwing it into the laundry basket. 
And people say global warming doesn't exist. That's not me getting political, mind you. That's me just feeling the heat. As I've said here before, I don't recall these types of seasons back in the '70s when I was a kid. 

I took a few snaps of the bookshelves because I made a few slight decorative additions. Here's part of the hard-boiled crime shelf;


General and classic fiction has a couple of classic cars;


And the Bond shelf needed one more tweak. When I visited the gun range in Thailand a couple of years ago, I picked up a few spent shells, thinking that I wanted some little keepsake from the experience. A 9mm slug from the Glock 17 would do nicely;


A few light taps with a hammer were required, but it got in there in the end. That ain't coming out without pliers.


I'm inclined to perhaps drill a little deeper so that the shell sits in a little further, but maybe I'll just leave it be. 

I switched over to the Longines Expeditions Polaires (that's the short name for it) on Thursday night when I began the typecast up top;



And here's how a couple of the photos taken with the Trip 35 turned out;


Notice the photo of Madame Wispola Dusenberg doing what she does best. Which is sweet F.A.
We had three mid-Century vintage fans in the house. We use the best one. It's a classic Mistral with a slight hammertone finish. 
The other two fans had cords that had melted slightly. The motors in these things can get pretty hot and I think these fans are now an electrical hazard. I had contemplated getting them re-wired, but to be honest, I couldn't be bothered. One of them was the Elcon fan that belonged to my family. This one also had a broken blade fixture which would require some real MacGyvering. I thought about keeping it ('cos I'd figured out a MacGyver-style repair for it), but decided that we couldn't store it anywhere, so my wife took it to a local thrift store. She explained what was wrong with it and they told her they wouldn't even try to fix and sell it, but rather, they were going to put it on display near the clothing racks. Because, you know, hipsters love that sort of thing. They think it's totes amazeballs.
I visit this thrift store from time to time and it'll be a kick to see this fan on display in there. I may even burst into tears when I see it. Either way, I took a picture of it a year or so ago in the interests of posterity and archival purposes;


Funny. I look at this picture and it conjures up memories of me sitting in the lounge room, drinking 7-X lemonade through a soggy paper straw and watching Get Smart repeats on Channel 7 at 5:30 on a hot Summer afternoon, the whirring hum of the plastic blades, with their rhythmic sweep across the room. 
Now those were simpler times. 

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend, all!

5 comments:

  1. I love the fan reverie. I can relate. I have similar relationships with summer afternoons, a particular type of 70s box fan from my grandparents' old house, and anything published by Marvel in 1984. Simpler times indeed.

    Your hipsters sentiments remind me of the scene in Blow-Up at the antique shop. It's odd to think it's the remnants of my childhood that now form the accoutrements of such a place.

    Those additions to the hard boiled and Universal Export shelves are excellent.

    That Longines Expeditions Polaires has a nice, clear look. I just did a quick google for the brand and your blog from 2011 came up. I've bookmarked it for a more in-depth look but looks looks like you and the family had a fun time making that one, and very informative as well.

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  2. Nice work on the shelves, T! though I'd argue that a .32acp (or even a .25 if you go way back) shell would have been a better suit for the Bond *book* shelf. 9mm would be appropriate for the Bond DvD shelf. :D

    Re watches; I finally got a yearn for a watch and have re-read your old double-post on watch picks. due to my inclination to find things in thrifts rather than going to the 'bay, I figure the best watch I'm likely to actually find would be a 70's/80's vintage Seiko. I'm preferring a non-dive auto-winder (not quartz), so I read up on the Seiko 5's - do you have any particular opinion of the automatic movements in this series?

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  3. Those shelves are looking great! I love your style there. And I'm also loving that Sinn watch.

    As for the heat. I'm glad it has suddenly shot to cold today. Mostly... except now I have to wear pants, dammit! I do recall March often being hot in the 80's. But I don't remember one so consistently in the 30's. This is just really uncomfortable.

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  4. A great idea to have themed book shelved, very stylish post as usual.

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  5. @ B McMolo, I'm no fan of hipsters, I can tell you. All those sleeve tattoos and silly beards.
    I think I have some Marvel Comics from 1984. Yep, definitely have "The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones", Issues 1-18, and a few Spidey comics (my all-time favourite superhero). Before they all got so prevalent and expensive.
    With the bookshelves, I have so much 'stuff' lying around that I thought some of it should go on display. Sure, I'll be constantly having to move things whenever I reach for a particular title, but that's okay. It'll keep me fit!
    That Longines review was fun, but I wasn't happy with the lighting in the photo of the letter. T'was Winter, after all. If you're after watches with a clean and simple look, believe me when I say that once you start looking, you'll begin to see them everywhere. The current Longines Heritage range has some very nice pieces-
    https://www.longines.com/#!/watches/heritage-collection

    @ Ted, a .32ACP would have been great. But when the instructor at the range said that they had 'the James Bond gun' and then he pulled out a Sig Sauer, I knew I wasn't going to get the right shell casings. As for .25 calibre, no luck there either. Closest I got was a .22 shell, which looks really small.

    Regarding watches, I love Seiko. Their 5 Series has been in production for decades. They're solid. Time-keeping wise, they can be a little lax (20 or 30 seconds fast or slow per day), but they'll run forever. Well, twenty or thirty years. Get yourself a decent watchmaker (anybody over 50) and you'll be fine. Might even be able to regulate the timekeeping to something more precise.
    Check eBay for modern models. They're pretty inexpensive, compared to their Swiss counterparts.
    Finding something from the '70s or '80s shouldn't be too hard, though. You'll probably find something in the thrift stores. Put a leather strap on it and you're in business.

    @ Scott K, yeah, the weather was getting hot. Still, we shouldn't complain.

    @ Steve K, thank-you! I wanted to give each genre some kind of item to lend a little atmosphere.

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